Expiration Date

  “Thank you,” Kootie said. He was wobbling dizzily as he stepped up the curb, and a man in a business suit called something to him. “Man back there,” Kootie yelled, “bleeding bad. Where’s a telephone?”

  The man pointed at a liquor store and said, “Dial nine-one-one!”

  Sure, thought Kootie wildly as he wobbled onward through the cold sunlight. Nine-one-one. I’d get to talk to my mom and dad again, drunk as fig beetles by now; Edison could shoot the breeze with the fat lady from the supermarket parking lot. At least I’d get my quarter back.

  He glanced back, but the doors of the police car hadn’t opened, and, blinking against the silvery glare of the sunlight, Kootie couldn’t see the one-armed man. He wished he hadn’t lost the sunglasses.

  “Where are we going?” he whispered, with timid hope, when he had limped around the corner of the liquor store and was facing a long alley with Dumpsters and old mattresses shored up against the graffiti-fouled walls.

  “Anywhere relatively private,” Edison said, and Kootie exhaled and began sweating with relief—the old man was not only back, but seemed to be sensible again, and would now take care of everything. “Keep pressing your hand hard against the cut, it’ll slow the bleeding. I need to get a look at this wound, and then we’ll go buy whatever sort of stuff we need to get you repaired. And some liquor. I really don’t think we can get by, here, without some liquor.”

  “Shit, no,” said Kootie, stumbling forward down the alley.

  His face was cold and sweaty, but he smiled, for Edison apparently wasn’t going to scold him for his language this time.

  CHAPTER 32

  “… How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I wonder?”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  DIOS TE GUARDE TAN linda,” said Angelica Elizalde softly into the sea breeze.

  She had taken off her sneakers in order to wade out in the low, breakwater-tamed surf of Los Angeles Harbor. The lights of the Queen Mary rippled across the dark water, and Elizalde shivered now when she looked at the vast old ship out there by San Pedro.

  She had walked down to this narrow stretch of beach from the bus stop at Cherry and Seventh, and she was still putting off the decision of whether or not to meet the Peter Sullivan person up in the parking lot on the bluff. She glanced at her watch and saw that she still had half an hour in which to decide.

  She paused and looked back up the shore. A hundred yards west of her, the Mexican women’s fire still fluttered and threw sparks on the breeze. She might just plod back there and talk to them some more. The bruises on her knees and hip were aching in the cold, and it would be nice to sit by the fire, among people who could hear her secrets and not consider her insane.

  Elizalde had walked up to the fire when the sun was still a flattened red coal in the molten western sky, and in her exhaustion her Spanish had effortlessly come back to her, so that she was able to return the greetings of the women and make small talk.

  She had smiled at the toddler daughter of one, and the woman had touched the girl’s forehead and quickly said, “Dios te guarde tan linda”—God keep you pretty baby. Elizalde had remembered her grandmother doing the same whenever a stranger looked at one of the children. It was to deflect mal ojo, the evil eye. But Elizalde also remembered that it was a routine precaution, and she smiled at the mother too, and crossed herself. Only after the mother had smiled back, and Elizalde had accepted the gestured offer of a seat on the sand beside the fire, had she felt hypocritical.

  Veladoros, devotional candles in tall glasses, ringed the fire; and Elizalde soon learned that these women were here waiting for midnight, when, it then being the Friday before El Día de los Muertos, they would bathe their piedras imanes in the seawater.

  Elizalde realized that she had not misunderstood the word yesterday it did mean magnets. Her new friend Dolores untied her handkerchief and showed her her own, a doughnut-sized magnet from a stereo speaker. The best ones, Elizalde had gathered, were the little ones from old telephones—stubby cylinders, no bigger than a dime in cross section, that looked like the smoking “snakes” that her brothers had always lit on Cinco de Mayo and the Fourth of July.

  Witches used the magnets as part of the ritual that transformed them into animals, she learned, but piedra imanes were good things to have around the house to attract good luck and deflect spells. The magnets needed to be fed—by tossing them into dirt or sand so that they became bristly with iron filings—and it was a good idea to immerse them in the sea on this one Friday every year.

  As she’d sat there and listened to the gossip and the jokes and the occasional scolding of one of the children for playing too close to the fire, Elizalde had lain back against a blanket over an ice chest, and from time to time had made such answers and remarks as she imagined her grandmother would have.

  And she heard stories—about a man in Montebello who had to wear sunglasses all the time, because one night he had left his eyes in a dish of water in his garage and taken a cat’s eyes to see with while he made a midnight cocaine buy, and returned at dawn to find that the dog had eaten the eyes in the dish, leaving the man stuck with the vertical-pupiled, golden-irised cat’s eyes for the rest of his life (Elizalde had commented that, in fairness, the cat should have been given the dog’s eyes); about how raw eggs could be used to draw fevers, and how if the fevers had been very bad the egg would be hard-cooked afterward; about los duendes, dwarves who had once been angels too slow in trying to follow Lucifer to Hell, and so were locked out of Heaven and Hell both, and, with no longer any place in the universe, just wandered around the world enviously ruining human undertakings.

  Elizalde had already heard stories about La Llorona—the Weeping Lady—the ghost of a woman who had thrown her children into a rushing flood to drown, and then repented it, and forever wandered along beaches and riverbanks at night, mourning their deaths and looking for living children to steal in replacement. As a child, Elizalde had heard the story as having occurred in San Juan Capistrano, with the children drowned in the San Juan Creek; but, in the years since, she had also heard it as having occurred in just about every town that had a large Hispanic community, with the children reputedly thrown into every body of water from the Rio Grande to the San Francisco Bay. There was even an Aztec goddess, Tonantzin, who was supposed to have gone weeping through Nahuatl villages and stealing infants from their cradles, leaving stone sacrificial knives where the children had lain.

  These women that Elizalde had met tonight told a different version. Aboard the Queen Mary, they whispered, lived a bruja who had somehow lost all her children in the moment of her own birth, and then drowned her husband in the sea; and now she wandered weeping everywhere, night and day, eating los difuntos, ghosts, in an unending attempt to fill the void left by those losses. She had eaten so many that she was now very fat, and they called her La Llorona Atacado, the Stuffed Weeping Lady.

  Elizalde wondered what character of folklore she herself might fit the role of. Surely there was the story of a girl baptized once conventionally with water and once with a fertilized egg, who endured a second birth (out of a milk can!) in a shower of coins, and who fled her home to wander along far rivers, in a foredoomed attempt to avoid the ghosts of the poor people who had come to her for help, and whom she had let die.

  What would the girl in that story do next, having journeyed all the way back to her home village?

  She looked again at her watch. Ten of eight.

  She turned her plodding steps across the sand toward the steel stairs that led up the bluff to the parking lot. It was time to meet Peter Sullivan.

  Sullivan had parked the van in a dark corner of the lot, and had walked away from it to smoke a cigarette in the spotlight of yellow glare at the foot of a light pole a couple of hundred f
eet away. Moths fluttered around the glass of the lamp a dozen feet above his head, flickering and winking in and out of the light like remote, silent meteors.

  He had arrived at Bluff Park early, and had made a sandwich in the van with some groceries he’d bought after his flight from Venice; and though there were still three or four cans of beer in the little propane refrigerator, he had been drinking Coke for the last couple of hours. He always felt that Sukie was in a sense somewhere nearby when he was drunk, and anyway he wanted to be alert if the Elizalde psychiatrist actually showed up.

  He was watching the cars sweeping past on Ocean Boulevard, and wondering if he shouldn’t just get in the van and head back to Solville—which, he had learned, was the name given by the other tenants to the apartment building he had moved into today.

  Now that he was sober again—hungover, possibly—teaming up with this Elizalde woman didn’t seem like such a good idea. If she was unbalanced, which it sounded like she had every right to be, she might just lead deLarava to him. How could he take her to Solville, expose that perfect blind spot to her, when she might be crazy? He remembered his first sight of her in Venice—crouched in the mud below the canal sidewalk—wearing two sets of clothes—talking into a storm drain—!

  He took a last deep drag on the cigarette, then patted his jeans pocket for the van keys.

  And Elizalde touched his shoulder.

  Sullivan knew that he had felt the touch an instant before it had happened, and he knew it was her; but he stood without turning around, still staring out at the cars passing on Ocean Boulevard, and he exhaled the cigarette smoke in a long, nearly whistling exhalation as a slow snowfall of dead moths spun down through the yellow light to patter almost inaudibly on the asphalt.

  He dropped the cigarette among the lifeless little bodies, stepped on it, and then turned to face her, smiling wryly. “Hi,” he said.

  She sighed. “Hi. What do we do now?”

  “Talk. But not out here where we might draw attention, like we did this afternoon. That’s my van over in that corner.”

  “Those … hands are in it?”

  “Yeah. If they become my hands again, we’ll know somebody’s looking at us again.”

  They began walking across the asphalt away from the light, their swinging fingertips separated by three feet of chilly night air. Enough light reached the boxy old vehicle for it to be clearly visible.

  To his own annoyance, Sullivan found himself wishing that he had washed it. “Somebody egged my van,” he said gruffly. “Makes it look like I threw up out the window.”

  “While you were going backward real fast,” she agreed, stopping to stare at the dried smear. “When and how did that happen?”

  “Today.” He led her around the front of the van to the side doors. “A guy, an old friend of mine, tried to turn me over to a woman who wants to eat my father’s ghost; I think she wants to capture me, use me as a live lure. The old friend threw an egg at me as I was driving out of there.” He unlocked the forward of the two side doors and swung it open. The light was still on inside—the battery could sustain a light or two for a full day without getting too weak to turn the motor over. “Beer and Coke in the little fridge there, if you like.”

  Elizalde looked at him intently for a moment, then stepped lithely up into the van.

  She leaned one hip on the counter around the sink, and Sullivan noticed to his embarrassment that the bed was still extended, and unmade. I must not really have meant to meet her, he thought defensively.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t anticipating company.” And what is that supposed to mean? he asked himself. He threw her a helpless glance as he climbed up and pulled the door closed.

  “You’ve got to wash off the egg,” she said, and for a moment he thought she had meant on your face. Then he realized that she meant the egg on the outside of the driver’s door.

  “Is it important?”

  “I think it’s a marker,” she said, “and more than a visible marker. Like a magical homing device. Raw eggs have all kinds of uses in magic. I should get out of this van right now, and walk away, mask or no mask. You should too, in a different direction.”

  Sullivan sat down on the bed. “I’ve got a place we can go where the psychic static will drown out the egg’s signal. I’m pretty sure. Anyway, there’s certainly a hose at this place, we can wash it off.” She didn’t seem crazy, and he was tired of spinning through his own circular thought-paths over and over again. “I think we should stick together.”

  “That’s what Peter Sullivan thinks, huh.” She stepped around him and sat down in the passenger seat, watching him over her shoulder. “Okay, for a while. But let’s at least be a moving target.” She looked forward, out through the windshield, and stiffened.

  Sullivan stood up and hurried to the driver’s seat with the key.

  Outside in the parking lot, several people were standing on the asphalt a few yards away from the front bumper, shifting awkwardly and peering. Sullivan knew that he and Elizalde had been alone in the parking lot a few moments earlier.

  “Ghosts,” he said shortly, starting the engine. “Fresh ones, lit up by our overlapping auras.” He switched on the headlights, and the figures covered their pale faces with their lean, translucent hands.

  He tapped the horn ring to give them a toot, and the figures began shuffling obediently to the side. One, a little girl, was moving more slowly than the rest, and when he had clanked the engine into gear he had to spin the steering wheel to angle around her.

  “Damn little kid,” he said, momentarily short of breath. The way clear at last, he accelerated toward the Ocean Boulevard driveway.

  Elizalde pulled the seat belt across her shoulder and clicked the metal tongue of it into the slot by the console. “I saw her as an old woman,” she said quietly.

  He shrugged. “I guess each of ’em is all the ages they ever were. He or she was, I mean. Each one is—”

  “I got you. Put on your seat belt.”

  “The place is right here,” he said, pushing down the lever to signal for a left turn.

  The first faucet Sullivan found, on the end of a foot-tall pipe standing in weeds at the corner of the Solville lot, just sucked air indefinitely when the tap was opened. He walked across the dark lot to another, ascertained that it worked, and then drove the van over and parked it. He carried a big sponge out to scrub the outside of the driver’s door, and then had to go back inside for a can of Comet, but at last all the chips and strips of dried egg had been sluiced off the van, and he locked it up.

  Elizalde carried a beer in from the van to Sullivan’s apartment, and when she popped it open foam dripped on the red-painted wooden floor. The only light in the living room was from flame-shaped white bulbs in a yard-sale chandelier in the corner, and Sullivan berated himself for not having thought to buy a lamp somewhere today. At least there were electrical outlets—Sullivan noticed that Shadroe had put six of them in this room alone.

  Sullivan had carried the plaster hands inside, and he laid them against the door as though they were holding it closed.

  “This is your safe place?” Elizalde’s voice echoed in the empty room. She twisted the rod on the Venetian blinds over the window until the slats were vertical, then walked to the far wall and ran her long fingers over a patched section where Shadroe had apparently once filled in a doorway. “What makes it safe?”

  “The landlord’s dead.” Sullivan leaned against another wall and let himself slide down until he was sitting on the floor. “He walks around and talks, and he’s in his original body and he’s not … you know, retarded—he’s not a ghost, it’s still his actual self inside the head he carries around. I believe he’s been dead for quite a while, and therefore he must know it, and be taking steps to keep from departing this …”

  “Vale of tears.”

  “To use the technical term,” Sullivan agreed. “The place must be a terrible patch of static, psychically. The reason I think he’s aware of h
is situation is that he’s made it a terrible patch physically, too, a confusing ground-grid. All the original doors and windows seem to have been rearranged, and you can see from outside that the wiring is something out of Rube Goldberg. I can’t wait to start plugging things in.”

  “Running water can be a betrayer too.”

  “And he’s messed that up. I noticed earlier today that the toilet’s hooked up to the hot water. I could probably make coffee in the tank of it.”

  “And have steamed buns in the morning,” she said.

  Her smile was slight, but it softened the lean plane of her jaw and warmed her haunted dark eyes.

  “Hot cross buns,” added Sullivan lamely. “Speaking of which, do you want to order a pizza or something?”

  “You don’t seem to have a phone,” she said, nodding toward an empty jack box at the base of one wall. “And I don’t think we should leave this … compound again tonight. Do you have anything to eat in your van?”

  “Makings of a sandwich or two,” he said. “Canned soup. A bag of M&M’s.”

  “I’ve missed California cuisine,” she said.

  “You were out of town, I gather,” he said cautiously.

  “Oklahoma most recently. I took a Greyhound bus back here, got in late Tuesday night. Drove through the Mojave Desert. Did you ever notice that there are a lot of ranches, out in the middle of the desert?”

  “I wonder what they raise.”

  “Rocks, probably.” She leaned against the wall across from him. “ ‘Look out, those big rocks can be mean.’ And on cold nights they put gravel in incubators. And, ‘Damn! Last night a fox got in and carried off a bunch of our fattest rocks!’ ”

  “ ‘Early frost’ll kill all these nice quartzes.’ ”

  She actually laughed, two contralto syllables. “Don’t get excited now,” she said, “but your dead man’s got the heat turned all the way up in here, and not a thermostat in sight.” She unzipped the front of her jumpsuit and pulled down the shoulders, revealing a wrinkled Graceland sweatshirt; and when she pulled the jumpsuit down over her hips and sat down to bunch it down to her ankles, he saw that she was wearing faded blue jeans.